Bill Reynolds: Are we at the dawn of a sea change in sports?

It’s probably impossible to pinpoint just when the sports world turned.

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Posted Jul. 7, 2014 @ 8:36 pm

July 8, 2064

It’s probably impossible to pinpoint just when the sports world turned.

Maybe it was back in 2025 when Harvard announced it was giving up football, the same Harvard that had been playing football since 1873. Maybe that was the shot heard round the sports world, even though many of the smaller colleges had already given it up.

But this was Harvard, with all its prestige and all its clout, where Ted Kennedy had once played, and when the news broke it led every TV newscast in the country.

Or maybe it was when three more of the Ivy League colleges quickly followed, collectively saying that as “universities in good conscience we can no longer condone playing a sport that is hurting the long-term health of many of our student-athletes.”

Or maybe it was in the ensuing years, when more and more colleges announced they were giving it up, to the point that it no longer was even big news anymore, and had become the sports equivalent of a dog-bites-man story.

Or that by 2030, it was difficult to find an American high school that was still playing football, save for parts of the Midwest and in the South. So many of the rest had given it up, and why not? Once the groundswell had started, too many of the former NFL greats going public with their cognitive issues, you didn’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing, as Dylan once had said.

And he hadn’t even played football.

Or maybe it was when several former NFL greats said they no longer would allow their own sons to play football, citing their own health issues, once again a huge story all over the network news shows.

And then there had been the ultimate bombshell, of course, that day in 2030 that Notre Dame announced that it no longer would be playing football either, soccer now being played in the shadow of the Golden Dome where once it had been football.

Harvard was one thing. The entire Ivy League was one thing. All the smaller schools announcing that they, too, were out of the football business, had been one thing.

But Notre Dame?

Say it ain’t true, Knute Rockne.

Talk about a seismic change.

After that?

After that it seemed all but inevitable, as though the dominoes had started falling and there was nothing to stop them, certainly not public sentiment. Yes, there was still the NFL, and yes it was still popular, but no longer what it once had been. Yes, the Super Bowl was a significant event on the American sports scene, but more and it seemed like boxing had seemed in the early years of the century, its true glory days gone.

Bottom line?

The American sports landscape had irrevocably changed.

Was it because the number of people in the country with Hispanic origins was more than 50 percent?

Was it because soccer had been played in many American high schools for almost a century?

Was it because the TV ratings for the World Cup had surpassed those for the Super Bowl for 30 years now? And that the new American soccer league had replaced the English Premier League 25 years ago as the best pro league in the world, to the point that its ratings had been better than the NFL’s for a quarter of a century.

Was it because American soccer stars were now all the media, as big as Hollywood celebrities, all over the various platforms, the ultimate household names in an ever-connected world?

Was it the fact that more and more football was seen as so 20th century, at least to all the soccer aficionados, who jammed the bars and treated the World’s Cup as the world’s biggest party?

Was it all of the above?

That was the theory anyway, and it made sense, no doubt about that.

But there also was the sense that the seeds had been sown way back there in the summer of 2014, back when both the interest and the TV ratings in the World Cup had been sky high, as if the ground had been moving around under our feet almost without us knowing about it.

In retrospect, it made sense. The changing demographics of the United States. The football fallout. The rise of American soccer stars who became the kind of stars Tom Brady and Derek Jeter once had been. The ever-increasing sense that this was the world-wide sport in a world that technology makes smaller all the time.

And maybe it all started way back there in 2014, back when the World Cup got great TV ratings and it seemed as if the United States was discovering soccer in ways it hadn’t done before. Maybe it all started back there when Barack Obama was still in the White House, football was still king, and soccer still seemed like the new kid at the sports table, at least here in the United States.

Back when football started to look vulnerable, with too many former stars going public with the price they were now paying for all those Sunday afternoon cheers.

Back when the world began to change while we were looking the other way.